Medical pot shops are no big deal

You'd think licensed dispensaries for medical marijuana were all-ages opium dens from the wariness bordering on paranoia with which state and local officials are grudgingly preparing for them to open.

A year ago Friday, Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law a four-year pilot program allowing patients suffering from specific maladies to obtain, with a doctor's OK, therapeutic doses of marijuana. The marijuana will be sold at dispensaries accessible only to patients.

The state law required the dispensaries to be located at least 1,000 feet away from a "public or private preschool or elementary or secondary school or day care center, day care home, group day care home … part day child care facility … (or) area zoned for residential use."

You'd think our legislators were unaware that seemingly every few blocks in most communities in the state, businesses selling highly addictive drugs — narcotics, amphetamines, mood stabilizers and the like — have operated openly for years, even allowing children into their establishments.

I speak, of course, of licensed pharmacies.

You'd think they'd forgotten that most communities also host numerous establishments that sell, with no prescription required, an addictive substance that causes 88,000 premature deaths every year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

You'd think we'd have a grip by now. You'd think that facts and experience, rather than residual 'Reefer Madness' panic, would guide officials.— Eric Zorn

I speak, of course, of the restaurants, taverns and stores that sell alcohol.

Yes, these businesses are subject to zoning and other restrictions but nothing like the limits placed on medical pot dispensaries.

"I had no concern about these facilities being in our communities alongside other businesses," said state Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie, chief House sponsor of the Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Pilot Program Act. "But remember, this bill passed very narrowly (61-57), so I had to make a lot of compromises."

Lang said his colleagues expressed concern to him about possible increases in traffic and crime around dispensaries, so he added what he believed to be unnecessary restrictions.

And since then, local jurisdictions have been adding their own, additional and unnecessary buffer zones as the state awaits the opening of up to 60 dispensaries. Wednesday, the Chicago City Council banned medical marijuana dispensaries — the city is slated to have 13 — from manufacturing districts and transportation corridors, from areas near parks and forest preserves, and from certain downtown areas.

Even this wasn't enough to prevent our friends at the Sun-Times from splashing their front page with the alarming headline "Neighborhood joints: New zoning rules mean medical pot spots likely to pop up in busy areas."

You'd think Illinois was the first state — not the 20th — to OK the medical use of marijuana. You'd think there were no data whatsoever about the impact, if any, of dispensaries in busy or even comparatively idle areas.

But police agencies and academics have looked at just these sorts of concerns over the years. The Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C., has collected the results; nearly all of it reaches the same "hey, no big deal" conclusion reached by researchers from the University of South Florida, the University of Colorado and the New York City Criminal Justice Agency when they studied 275 medical marijuana distribution sites.

Despite all the advance warnings, they wrote in a paper published earlier this year, "these centers do not appear to have any impact on the urban landscape and, therefore, on the health of the communities in which they are located."

True, the model law promulgated by the Marijuana Policy Project calls for dispensaries and cultivation centers to be located 1,000 feet from existing schools. But Chris Lindsey, the organization's legislative analyst, said that restriction is intended simply to protect medical marijuana businesses from enhanced federal penalties should the Drug Enforcement Administration of the U.S. Department of Justice decide to crack down on dispensaries, which remain illegal under federal law.

That tension between federal and state laws is why conventional pharmacies and hospitals can't assume the responsibility for safe, medically approved distribution of the drug, the way they do with, say, OxyContin, Adderall and codeine.

You'd think we'd have a grip by now. You'd think that facts and experience, rather than residual "Reefer Madness" panic, would guide officials in their response to the prospect of relieving human suffering with clinical doses of marijuana.